Between two stays in Doha, as part of the preparations for the 2022 World Cup, organized from November 21 to December 18 in Qatar, Gianni Infantino will have to honor a legal appointment in Switzerland. According to several sources, contacted by The worldthe president of the International Football Federation (FIFA) will be heard for the first time as warned, in mid-May, by the two Swiss extraordinary prosecutors Ulrich Weder and Hans Maurer.
This hearing is part of the criminal proceedings opened in July 2020 against Mr. Infantino for “incitement to abuse of authority, violation of official secrecy and obstruction of criminal proceedings”. Contacted by The worldFIFA assured that “Mr. Infantino will continue to cooperate with the Swiss authorities, in person, as he always has.” As for Messrs. Weder and Maurer, they indicated ” not to provide any information on procedural acts during an ongoing criminal investigation. »
Elected in December 2021 by the Swiss Federal Assembly, the two extraordinary prosecutors are trying to shed light on three secret meetings (without minutes), in 2016 and 2017, between Mr. Infantino and the former Swiss Attorney General Michael Lauber , in charge of investigations in connection with FIFA between 2015 and 2019 and resigned in 2020.
At this stage, in addition to Mr. Infantino, Mr. Lauber, his ex-spokesperson, André Marty, as well as a childhood friend of the President of FIFA, the prosecutor of Haut-Valais Rinaldo Arnold, are being prosecuted.
Amid suspicions of collusion between FIFA and Swiss prosecutors, MM. Weder and Maurer are trying to find out what was the content of the discussions during these secret meetings. In a disciplinary report of March 2020, the supervisory authority of the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Confederation (AS-MPC) specified that “the reasons for the meetings that Mr. Lauber proposed have proven to be unfounded”.
“Collective amnesia”
In 2020, the Federal Administrative Court (TAF) concluded that “the Attorney General deliberately concealed the truth from AS-MPC during his hearing on November 12, 2018 and that he consciously silenced the third meeting with the FIFA President “.
“Such a case of collective amnesia is an aberration”, had estimated the TAF while MM. Lauber, Marty, Arnold and Infantino in turn “omitted” to mention to the authorities their participation in this third meeting organized, on June 16, 2017, at the Schweizerhof hotel in Bern. According to AS-MPC, that day, the “FIFA Procedures” would have been at the center of the discussions.
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